Shirin Review

Sometimes experiments don't work, and here is the terrible evidence. Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director whose work has grown increasingly abstract since his 2003 film Five, dispenses here with all cinematic convention. Shirin is certainly bold. It's also unwatchably tedious, arrogantly self-indulgent and - as drama - largely pointless.

Released in the UK as Iran's 2009 elections provoke international anxiety, some may feel that Kiarostami's strange exercise in anonymous intimacy is a dereliction of duty. Not to suggest that filmmakers have a moral obligation to anyone or that world cinema ought to be an extended item on 'Newsnight'. But Kiarostami is a filmmaker with access and insight to the private hopes and fears of ordinary Iranians, as well as a fearlessly innovative approach to filmmaking itself. It's his consummate skill behind the camera and the abundance of ideas which has informed his previous work which makes his decision here to say so little about anything infuriating on several levels.

Shirin is a film about - and of - an audience of around 100 Iranian women as they sit in a cinema and watch an unseen adaptation of a Persian folk tale - the tragic story of doomed lovers Khosrow and Shirin, conveyed here in English subtitles. As that story unfolds Kiarostami's camera pans from one woman's face to the next, lingering for a while to register smiles, blinks, twitches and tears, then moving slowly on. There is in this approach the suggestion of a hypnotic art installation, and were Shirin a nine-minute short it might raise an interesting point about the private way in which we experience the most public artform: cinema itself. But the subsequent 89 minutes of deadening repetition make this an exercise in endurance. As the tale of Khosrow and Shirin, with its weeping, wailing and tragic betrayals plays out, there is the sense of a film which might work better on the radio.